Reminds me of old bumblebee install script:
An extra space at line 351: rm -rf /usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorgThat reminds me…
In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.
Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.
Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.
The theme contained rm -rf, but claims it wasn’t malicious intent…I assume rm -rf for cleanup, but seems like it should have a apecific path other than /
The command was rm -rf $pathvariable
Bug in the code caused the path to be root. Wasn’t explicitly malicious
Don’t most distros have safeguards against this? I tried
sudo rm -rf /in an Ubuntu VM that I was about to delete just to see what happened, and it gave me a warning. I had to add some other option to bypass the warning.it apparently was defaulting to the home dir, not
/Oh, oof.
Hopefully most people take regular snapshots.
Yes,
rm -rf --allow-unsafeOr something is required
--no-preserve-root
When I worked at Pixar long ago an intern had a cron job that was intended to clean up his nightly build and ended up deleting everything on the network share for everyone!
Fortunately there were back-ups and it was fine, but that day was really hilariously annoying while they tracked down things disappearing.
Oof
Was it a native theme or a downloaded/custom theme?
Downloaded from the KDE store
Thank you. I couldn’t get google translate to work for me.
Custom download
deleted by creator
A theme is software and software has bugs. While this one had a pretty dramatic effect, you take basically the same risk with every program you run. This, along with hardware and user errors are why backups are so important; they change a disaster to an inconvenience.
/ Preach mode off
A windows device just wiped the hardware settings of a periphery device, because it got an update and the new lighting settings wanted to control the LEDs in that device. All gone
The Gray Layout installation script ran the
rm -rfcommand, which normally removes all files from the deviceTranslation difficulties, or does the author really think that’s what it’s normally used for?
It’s an accurate translation. Mikrobitti is a generic computer magazine (with a long history) so it could either be that the author is not very familiar with Linux cli or it might also be that they were trying to put it in layman’s terms.
Click bait
Trust but verify. It was a text file, it doesn’t get much easier to do the second step of that.
… in which case you would have seen that they delete a path referenced by an env var being set earlier.
How likely do you think it would have been to notice, that this env var will turn up empty in your specific case?
A theme that deleted anything would have been enough of a red flag.
I wonder what the sudo rm -rf equivalent for windows is
Microsoft thinks it’s uninstalling Edge.
That’s all you really need to do to break windows. /s
Edge/Internet Explorer is/were a cornerstone of any Windows install. Uninstall that and you can get all kinds of weird issues on your system.
Like my auto-installed Copilot doesn’t launch?
Oh no!
For some context, I’ve got a Windows install that I primarily keep around for VR gaming which I remove Edge from. That Copilot thing is the only “issue” I’ve noticed.
Windows doesn’t have
sudo(not yet, at least) and privileges work a bit different as even as an administrator, you may not have full rights.To overcome that obstacle, you’d need to run a shell as an administrator (hold CTRL+Shift, then use the start menu entry or right-click it and select run as administrator).
Next obstacle: We have a separate drive for each partition, but no root folder.
If we assume we’re running on a laptop or PC with a single drive and a single partition*, then it’s just
In cmd.exe:
del /F /S C:\In Powershell:
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Path C:\When you want to delete all (mounted) partitions/drives, you need to iterate over them. (Note that’s from the top of my head, didn’t check the script if it works).
In cmd.exe:
REM Not gonna do that, I'm no masochistIn Powershell:
Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem | Foreach-Object { Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Path "$($_.Name):\" }Done. Mounting additional partitions before that is left as an exercise for the reader.
*note that even a standard installation of windows creates 3 partitions. One for the bootloader, one for the recovery system and then the system drive. Only the latter is mounted and will be deleted by this. The other two will still be intact.
SIDPlay did something similar on the Mac.
It has the neat built-in feature of rsyncing the high voltage SID collection to your computer.
However, if you deleted your local copy of it and tried to re-sync it’d update (with deletes) against
/instead. Bye bye files.Hetken jo ajattelin, että mitä hiivatin noituutta nämä Suomeksi olevat konekääntäjän tekstit ovat olevinaan.
I wonder how much would break, and how much time it would take to update everything, if all shells decided to implement a breaking change to prevent these kind of scenarios. E.g. make “set -u” default or some other solution
wiped clean?
It is windows users that pretend to be linux user.
They are root.
